Culture and social environment

have you ever wondered why children develop odd understandings? For example, a child was heard to say, “Mommy went to the hospital to throw up her baby.” Where did the child get that idea if no one told him that?

Have you ever tried to help a child solve a problem or gain a new understanding? Were you successful?

This week, you have been studying the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. These two 20th-century geniuses agreed that cognitive growth occurs as a result of processes internal to the child. However, they disagreed on the precise process. Piaget focused on developmental stages and Vygotsky focused on adults as the purveyors of cultural knowledge.

Returning to the example above, Piaget would say that the child thinks intuitively and has come to a mistaken conclusion. The child will automatically correct mistaken ideas as cognitive growth progresses and the child becomes able to reason, first more concretely and then more abstractly.

Vygotsky, on the other hand, would say that the child learns language, cultural knowledge, and rules from adults. If the adults understand the child’s current knowledge level and scaffold new information carefully, then the child can learn at a faster rate. This distance between what the child can know and do alone, and what the child can know and do with adult support, is called the Zone of Proximal Development.